Economics

April 04, 2017

Frequently in arguments over social policy, conservatives will haul out Paul's admonition in 2 Thessalonians "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" in order to justify cutting or eliminating welfare programs, on the ground that such programs promote "idleness" among the poor.

In Religion Dispatches, Dan Schultz critiques those arguments, first by noting some of the inherent problems that both those on the right and the left face in translating scripture into social policy, but then by noting how misapplied the this particular passage is:

Paul wasn’t writing to a “sect.” It was a particular church at Thessalonica, and he was writing to correct a mistake of his own creation. In 1 Thessalonians, he tells the church that Jesus will be coming soon. That encourages some of the members to give up their jobs in preparation for the parousia, living off the community while they wait. Those are the people Paul says should get back to work: Jesus may be coming, but not so quickly that you don’t have to contribute to society.

Perhaps Rep. Arrington knows of a widespread problem with people receiving SNAP benefits who refuse to work because they think the second coming is just around the corner, but I sort of doubt it.

I’m going to give the edge to Protas here. Generalizing away from specific passages, the unmistakable pattern in scripture is meaningful social care for the poor. That doesn’t command government intervention, of course, but neither does it rule it out.

Schultz rightly notes that plucking this passage out of its context in order to justify refusing support for the poor does violence to both the situation in which Paul was writing, and to the overall tenor of both Judaism and Christianity with respect to care for the poor. It is also worth noting, in passing the context of both Greek and Roman society at large, which were based on the widespread use of slave labor. For most of the privileged classes, "idleness" was not a problem for the poor, but a problem for the wealthy. The poor had no choice but to work if they wanted to eat, and in the case of slaves had no real choice at all. But in the case of the rich, the landed, the elite, who were often also the ruling classes, the legislators, the statesmen and the philosophers, idleness was a fact of life. They relied on the labor of the poor and of slaves in order to support their idleness.

However, the larger point remains vital and relevant: How should we use scripture in the formulation of public policy. On the one hand, in a pluralistic democratic society, the answer is "we shouldn't" at least in the sense that, just because we believe the Bible says something is not, in itself, a reason we should enact that thing as law. On the other hand, however, as Schultz notes, for people of faith, the traditions to which they belong, including scripture, form their moral predispositions and attitudes in inescapable ways. We learn who we are as moral beings through our engagement with those texts and traditions, so they inevitably shape our attitude toward social policy.

But in that case, it's vitally important that we understand and interpret those texts properly, in their own contexts and with respect to their relevance to our time and place. Without a robust hermeneutic that can allows us to move from the time and place of those texts to our own, at best we will misinterpret the social implications of the Bible, and at worst, we will use those misinterpretations in ways that harm the poorest and the most vulnerable among us.

March 30, 2017

At The New Republic Jonathan Masalic makes the case for one, while also illuminating a similar proposal, that for the universal guarantee of a job. The universal employment proposal, which was suggested by Jeff Spross, would work like this:

Spross argues in the current issue of the journal Democracy, they ought to counter President Donald Trump’s rhetoric with a concrete offer to every American who wants dignity and a decent living: a federally funded job. Spross, an economics and business writer for The Week, makes a thorough case for a universal job guarantee, writing that “a job is not merely a delivery mechanism for income that can be replaced by an alternative source. It’s a fundamental way that people assert their dignity, stake their claim in society, and understand their mutual obligations to one another.” ...

Spross proposes that someone with a full-time job in the federal program would work on infrastructure and community development projects and be paid $25,000, plus full benefits. The proposal has precedent, not only in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, but in Argentina within the past decade. With jobs of last resort paying well above the current federal minimum wage, unemployment would drop to nothing and workers higher up the income ladder would gain tremendous bargaining power. The “dignity deficit” would disappear immediately.

Masalic, by contrast, proposes a Universal Basic Income:

But because basic income is the more inclusive program—encompassing children, the disabled, and everyone else who cannot work—it promotes a kind of justice that a make-work program cannot. Moreover, in an economy that can substitute machines for human labor, a job guarantee could transform into a de facto basic income guarantee anyway. As Avent notes, the more expensive human labor is, the more appealing machine labor becomes. With a high wage floor and no slack in the labor market, it would make economic sense to automate jobs that humans currently do for low wages, like customer service, transportation, and sales. This would push even more people to take the guaranteed jobs. At some point, there might not be enough productive work to go around. Once people find themselves doing pointless make-work just to keep busy and qualify for a paycheck—in other words, once guaranteed jobs become bullshit jobs—we may as well call it art.

I've been persuaded for a long time that we need to find a workable mechanism to establish a Universal Basic Income in the United States. As Masalic notes, it would provide support for parents who want to stay home with their children, it would give workers the same kind of leverage that Spross's universal jobs program would, and it would allow those whose understanding of "work" does not correspond to the demands of post-industrial capitalist society. It could allow for a new well-spring of creative activity, from artists and musicians who are willing to live at the modest level a universal income would allow, while also allowing those who wish to strive to make more.

Here's the fundamental problem, which I think Masalic identifies well: When did we ever agree as a society that our lives should depend on our willingness to take crappy, dead-end jobs, and whittle our lives away on meaningless work? Why is it better to do that than to detach the need to survive from the need to "work" in the capitalist/acquisitive sense of the word? And, fundamentally, who benefits from the existing system? Not the lowest paid workers. Not even those in the middle class. This is a system which is set up to perpetuate itself by convincing anyone who isn't willing to take literally any job they're offered because they alternative is starvation that they are immoral, lazy bums.

The dignity of work is found finally in its meaningfulness. I'd ultimately be happy if we implemented a program like Spross's. But it ultimately needs to be a gateway to the far more radical, and far more necessary, guarantee of a basic income.

July 07, 2015

Joyce Meyer, televangelist and prosperity gospel doyen, can't understand why anyone would criticize her for having a net worth of approximately $25 Million:

Meyer sees no problem with her compensation, saying, “We do not agree that the ministry is in violation of any law. If the IRS were to investigate, we would fully cooperate.”

She has also shared that “there’s no need for us to apologize for being blessed. You can be a businessman here in St. Louis, and people think the more you have, the more wonderful it is … but if you’re a preacher, then all of a sudden it becomes a problem.”

I am somehow reminded of a statement by Jesus. Something to the effect of a rich man and the eye of a needle. Of course, Meyer, being of the ilk that believe that money=God's blessing, would probably be among those who argue, falsely, that "The Needle" was a gate in Jerusalem that a camel could only pass through on it's knees -- that is to say, humbly. Of course, everyone I've ever heard offer this sorry excuse also insists that of course, despite their own enormous and extravagant wealth, they are perfectly capable of embodying the proper spirit of humility Jesus was speaking of. Funny how that works.

Of course, there was no such gate in Jerusalem, and the meaning of the saying is really pretty clear: Extravagant wealth is an obstacle to following God. Yet, as soon as they start acquiring it, Christians seem to go to great lengths to argue that, one way or another, Jesus didn't really mean it. And of course, that's the bread and butter of the Prosperity Gospel.

January 03, 2015

I've been a fan of Rush for a very long time. They were one of my earliest musical influences, and I can say with complete honesty that they were probably in no small measure the reason I majored in philosophy. Neil Peart was one of my early influences as a drummer, and a model for how I thought song lyrics should be written, as well as what themes they should address. There is a picture in an old Rush tour book of Neil sitting on the bus reading Aristotle, which struck me as an awesome way to live a life.

That said, there was always something, particularly about early Rush, that grated on me. While they may have been my gateway drug to philosophy, that was in large measure because I was aware of the influence Ayn Rand had on Neil's thought and writing. As has often been said, many 15-year old boys encounter Rand briefly in the course of their intellectual development, and then quickly move on. Those who don't, well, sometimes they develop weird ideas.

For Rush, those weird ideas were embodied in songs like "Anthem" (the title based on a Rand story), 2112 (the plot mostly borrowed from the same story), and "The Trees." These songs tend to embody Rand's stilted amoral libertarianism, though like most Rand adherents, Neil Peart didn't follow her to the extent of being a full-blown psychopath. His intellectual life was stocked with many other, moderating, influences.

That said, Rush gained a bit of a reputation in the early part of their career for being kind of right wing, and "The Trees" is perhaps one of the reasons why. It's a fable about a conflict between maple trees and oaks. The maples complain because the oaks are so tall they suck up all the light in the forest, while the oaks can't conceive of why the maples would have a problem with that. Ultimately, the conflict is resolved after the maples form a union, and equality is maintained with "hatchet, ax, and saw."

I think most people read the song as a kind of ironic union-busting tirade, in which the maples try to force the oak to give them something that they're not entitled to, and in the end are hoist upon their own petard. Almost everyone I've talked about the song with over the years has read it that way, and I did myself for a long time. But you know what? The more I think about it, the more I think that the song ultimately sides with the maples.

If you begin from the premise that this is just another of Neil's Rand-inspired right wing songs, then it's easy to see the anti-union elements as predominant. But consider how the song describes the oaks. They didn't earn their status as tallest trees in the forest. The song explicitly says that they are just "made" that way. Furthermore, their attitude toward the maples is insufferably clueless and condecending -- that they should "just be happy in their shade."

Ultimately this is a song about the distribution of a limited resource, and it raised the question of who should be entitled to consume that resource, and on what grounds. Rand's philosophy emphasized the idea that those who have access to the goods of society are entitlted to them on the grounds of their superior intellect, creativity, and ability. In short, (on a charitable reading) Rand is advocating a form of meritocracy. Other libertarians, like Robert Nozick, also emphasize the meritocratic dimension of their philosophy. They object to redistribution of wealth on the basis of the fact that it would be unjust to transfer wealth to someone who is not "entitled" to it on the basis of some arbitrary conception of equality.

What this analysis leaves out though is the whole problem of inherited wealth. Or rather, it doesn't leave it out, it just doesn't see it as a problem. Nozick's philosophy sees it as simply a just transfer of wealth from one legal holder to another, each of whom is "entitled" to it as a matter of freedom and personal liberty. However, inherited wealth undermines the meritocratic dimension of this entire philosophy, since it leads to the accumulation of riches at the top and the maldistribution of social goods.

The result is much as described in the song: The wealthy don't earn their wealth. They just "can't help it if they like the way they're made" (that is, rich), and have no desire to change. What's more, they have no means of conceiving of what it's like to be deprived of access to a scarce resource because someone else is hogging it all. They have enough sunlight, so therefore everyone else must have as much as they need as well. The oaks consume more because they need more. The maples wouldn't know what to do with that extra sunlight if they had it, so they should just enjoy the shade.

And so, in the song, the maples form a union. Unions are an essential part of the creation of a rough equality in capitalist societies, allowing workers to bargain collectively with management for wages and benefits. They also provide political leverage with governments, as they represent an identifiable consitutency that can deliver (or deny) votes and support to candidates. Thus strong unions serve an essential function in democracies, and benefit both the workers themselves, and by creating conditions for broad equality and social and political stability. Needless to say, the right hates them.

So when a conservative song writer writes a song in which unions figure, it's probably a good bet that they are the villains. (As a side note, much as I have always loved Frank Zappa, his anti-unionism was always one of the things, as with Rush, that drove me nuts about him). However, this is where my rethinking of this song has really taken hold. Instead of reading it as a conservative anti-union song, it can instead be read as a pro-union, egalitarian song.

The maples did exactly the right thing. In the face of oak intransigence and obstruction, the only way that they could effectively demand access to a resource that both they and the oaks needed, was to organize politically in order to leverage power, and force the oaks to do what they were unable to do on their own -- "we will make them give us light," that is, give us access to a resource necessary for our survival. But doing that means that someone needs to be empowered to weild the hatchet, ax, and saw. In other words, this becomes the realm of legitimate government intervention in order to secure greater equality. The maples couldn't do it on their own. The oaks were unwilling to (they "just shake their heads" at the maples' demands), so through collective organization, the maples empower a third party to enforce equality.

The ironic twist to all of this, I suppose, is that the maples are as much subject to the rule of hatchet, ax, and saw, as the oaks are. But I fail to see why that should be a problem. If the law is to be applied equally, then it absolutely should insist that the maples are not entitled to more light than the oaks any more than the oaks are. And so by creating conditions where a law enforces relative equality between oaks and maples, not based on inheretance but based on access, it opens the opportunity for sunlight to all.

When I initially proposed this idea, one friend of mine read it as promoting conformity. Whether she was thinking of Rand or not when she suggested that, I do not know, but that critique plays directly into the Randian presumption that access to wealth is somehow equivalent to creativity and individuality. That the hatch, ax, and saw level us into one uniform set of drones. On the contrary, this has got nothing to do with enforcing conformity. It has everything to do with allowing equality of opportunity so that everyone may strive for individual excellence. It is the lack of equality that prevents so many in society from striving for what they can achieve, while allowing those at the very top, particularly those with inherited wealth, to squander it pointlessly or horde it greedily.

By mandating the redistribution of wealth via law, there is a relative leveling of income but for the purpose of allowing access to social goods that are in large measure denied those at the margins of society. This can allow for the creation of a society in which everyone may seek to fulfill their own creative, intellectual, and artistic goals. In that sense, think the maples have exactly the right idea, and taking their side opens up the possibility of a society that is, to echo another famous Rush tune from the same era, "Closer to the Heart."

PS., As a footnote to all of this, and in support of my reading, I can't help but wonder about the significance of a Canadian band choosing a conflict between maples and oaks as the centerpiece of the song. Could it also reflect the relative status of Canada and the United States? In which case, it seems again to clearly be a pro-maple song.

April 16, 2014

A new academic study of the relationship between economics and politics in the United States comes to an interesting conclusion, one that I think scans with what many of us have intuited for a long time about American society, but that runs counter to our democratic ideological presuppositions. In short, the study argues, we are not a democracy at all, but an oligarchy.

As summarized in the abstract, their "analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." In other words, the super-rich and the institutions dedicated to serving their interests have a much greater effect on U.S. policy than the opinions and actions of ordinary people.

And this is precisely the kind of conclusion one would reach by watching the news for the past five years. During this period, the Tea Party, which is a total sham of a political movement, orchestrated, financed and inspired by the ideological preferences of the super rich, like the Koch brothers, and their mouth-pieces, like Rick Santelli, has been effective at preventing any genuine social reform or the achievement of any substantial redistribution of wealth and power in the United States. Even their great failure -- preventing Obama's health reform act -- was the failure to prevent an act that really ultimately solidified the control of health care by private insurance companies, to the benefit of their bottom lines.

Meanwhile, Occupy, which was a genuinely grassroots movement, suffered both from it's own self-destructive tendencies and the organized attempts to repress it by governments and media organizations. And while I lay the blame for Occupy's failure mostly at the feet of its organizers, it's also true that Occupy groups that sprouted up in other countries with a deeper tradition of social protest and a more representative set of governing structures, were at least moderately more effective at achieving serious reforms.

And this brings me back to Thomas Piketty, whom I mentioned yesterday, and his book Capital in the 21st Century. Another article about the book discusses the political and economic salience of the message occupy was promoting:

Piketty's thesis, supported by his extensive research, is that financial inequality in the 21st century is on the rise, and accelerating at a very dangerous pace. For one thing, this changes the way we look at the past. We already knew that the end of capitalism predicted by Marx never happened – and that even by the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, wages across the rest of Europe were already on the rise. We also knew that Russia was anyway the most undeveloped country in Europe and it was for this reason that communism took root there. Piketty goes on to point out, however, that only the varying crises of the 20th century – mainly two world wars – prevented the steady growth of wealth by temporarily and artificially levelling out inequality. Contrary to our perceived perception of the 20th century as an age in which inequality was eroded, in real terms it was always on the rise.

In the 21st century, this is not only the case in the so-called "rich" countries – the US, the UK and western Europe – but also in Russia, China and other countries which are emerging from a phase of development. The real danger is that if this process is not arrested, poverty will increase at the same rate and, Piketty argues, we may well find that the 21st century will be a century of greater inequality, and therefore greater social discord, than the 19th century.

The question that governments need to begin contemplating is whether continuing to serve the interests of wealthy elites at the expense of the population at large is worth the increased instability that will, sooner or later, erupt into another mass protest movement, uncontrolled and potentially uncontrollable by political, economic, and media elites.

For those of us who value liberal structures and institutions, the possibility of such mass disruption should be of great concern, because there is no guarantee that it will result in a more equal, just and representative society. It could just as easily result in a prolonged era of social strife, violence, and and repression. This isn't the first time we've been to this dance, and we've got lots of examples of how this can play out. The fact that the United States transitioned from the social upheaval of the 1930s into a relatively just and stable set of economic norms in the post World War II era is no insurance that it will do so again.

If we value the peace and stability of democratic societies then, we'd better start thinking seriously about what it would mean to create a more genuinely representative and equal society now, before there is blood in the streets.

April 15, 2014

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been getting a lot of attention since it's French publication late last year. It's been out in English for several months now, and my copy is sitting on my desk as we speak. The Guardian has a good article summarizing Piketty's argument. The conclusion:

The lesson of the past is that societies try to protect themselves: they close their borders or have revolutions – or end up going to war. Piketty fears a repeat. His critics argue that with higher living standards resentment of the ultra-rich may no longer be as great – and his data is under intense scrutiny for mistakes. So far it has all held up.

Nor does it seem likely that human beings' inherent sense of justice has been suspended. Of course the reaction plays out differently in different eras: I suspect some of the energy behind Scottish nationalism is the desire to build a country where toxic wealth inequalities are less indulged than in England.

The solutions – a top income tax rate of up to 80%, effective inheritance tax, proper property taxes and, because the issue is global, a global wealth tax – are currently inconceivable.

But as Piketty says, the task of economists is to make them more conceivable. Capital certainly does that.

I am reminded of Karl Polanyi's remark in The Great Transformation that socialism is the self-defense of society against the economy. This is the main reason I still call myself a socialist.

March 31, 2014

The ugly fact that we must face is that this thing can go much farther still. Plutocracy shocks us every day with its viciousness, but that doesn’t mean God will strike it down. The middle-class model worked much better for about ninety-nine percent of the population, but that doesn’t make it some kind of dialectic inevitability. You can build a plutocratic model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth century. It requires different things: instead of refrigerators for all, it needs bought legislatures and armies of strikebreakers—plus bailouts for the big banks when they collapse under the weight of their stupid loans, an innovation of our own time. All this may be hurtful, inefficient, and undemocratic, but it won’t dismantle itself all on its own.

That is our job. No one else is going to do it for us.

Which of course creates the obvious next question: If it's up to us to do it, how do we go about it? I remain struck by the ease with which the plutocrats Frank drescribes have managed to manipute the political climate over the past several years. From Fox news to the useful idiots of the Tea Party, to opportunitic Congressional redistricting, the deck has been so thoroughly stacked against solving the underlying problems of inequality, it's hard to imagine any enduring solution without a genuine mass uprising. And those closest we've come to that was Occupy Wall Street, which started off with such revolutionary potential, but, as so often happens on the left, fell victim to its own narcissistic idealism.

Where then to look for the next mass movement to overcome plutocracy? As is often the case, we probably won't know it's coming until it arrives. But we can prepare the ground by continuing to point out the problems of injustice caused by the continuing growth in inequality, and reminding people that it's within their power to change it.

February 26, 2014

In the context of noting the ongoing arguments within evangelicalism about sexuality (this time occasioned by Arizona's rotten, no-good very bad proposed new law re-instituting Jim Crow laws, but this time for gays and lesbians), Tony Jones makes a very interesting point:

If we’re honest, we can acknowledge that “evangelical” is an empty signifier. The term is up for grabs. Some (McKnight) see it as a theological category; others (Moorohler) consider it a cultural/political category. The media tends toward the latter definition since they have a tin ear for theological nuance. And, as long as the term has no agreed-upon meaning, we will be trapped in arguments of incommensurability.

Of course, my first instinct is to say that, within Christian discourse, we should concern ourselves first and foremost with the theological categories, and eschew the cultural categories to the extent that we can, but it's obviously never as simple as that, as theological terminology is deployed within a cultural setting.

But this is an issue that I often think about with regard to what it means for me to identify myself as a Christian. It's been clear to be for as long as I've been protestant that, whatever kindof protestant I was, I was not an "evangelical" protestant. I was, rather emphatically, a "mainline" protestant, which I took to mean affiliated with historic denominations and theological schools of thought that extended back to the Protestant Reformation. Of course, in the lands of the protestant reformation, they don't use the word "protestant" to describe my theological and ecclesiastical outlook, rather protestants are called, in Germany, Evangelische. Evangelicalism as a separate category to describe relatively conservative, fundamentalist, and charismatic churches is a relatively new development, and seems to mostly be a phenomenon in the English-speaking world.

And so Tony's point is very well taken. I'm not evangelical because evangelical entails a certain set of theological or moral categories that I disagree with. Sometimes it does, but just as often it doesn't, and as younger evangelicals move away from the culture warrior pose of the Jerry Falwell generation, the fault lines between what constitutes properly "evangelical" Christianity and "mainline" Christianity will increasingly begin to fade. The term may not be quite the empty signifier that Tony suggests, but it is certainly a term under a great deal of negotiation. And what Jonathan Merritt, Rachel Held Evans, and many younger evangelicals embrace the term in a broad sense that includes gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender Christians, for some time to come, that view will remain at loggerheads with the view that imagines that no such broadly conceived conception of evangelicalism is possible.

October 02, 2013

There has been a great deal of discussion about the government shutdown over the last couple of days. Most of that conversation has revolved around the political dynamics involved (and keeping scores about who's winning and who's losing). Jim Wallis of Sojournors argues that the real conversation should be a moral and theological one. His argument is that shutting down the government is "un-biblical."

Meanwhile, Frank Schaeffer makes the case that the blame for the shutdown can be laid squarely at the feet of the American Evangelical movement, or more specifically, the dead-enders of the Christian Right.

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,”the newly radicalized evangelicals (and their anti-abortion Roman Catholic co belligerents) added “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the evangelicals doing this “reclaiming” cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles and victims of secularism. In my new book And God Said, “Billy!” I examine in depth the paranoid fantasy land of delusion this sort of thinking took me and millions of others into. What they never admitted was what my alter-ego Billy in my book never admits: we evangelicals were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because we evangelicals’ political views on social issues conflicted with most people’s views, but also because we evangelicals found ourselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.

Pointing to Sarah Palin as the apotheosis of this know-nothing strain of evangelical self-righteousness, he then turns the tables and, like Wallis, argues for a more Christian view of place of government in the common life:

What’s so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a “Christian foundation” and demanding a “return to our heritage” and/or more recently trashing health care reform as “communist” and demanding the shutdown of the government in order to overturn this “communist” invention by a “non-American” president, ignored the fact that one great contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

Government was seen as part of God’s Plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly “anti-Christian” Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian “heresy,” with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

Meanwhile, Morgan Guyton at Huffington Post makes the argument that there is a theology behind the government shutdown: It is rooted in the weird biblicist crypto-fundamentalist Calvinism of R. J. Rushdoony:

On the eve of our government shutdown, I wanted to do some research into the theological roots of Senator Ted Cruz, the standard-bearer of the Tea Party Republicans behind the shutdown. I'm interested in understanding what account of Christianity creates the "no compromise" crusade that the Tea Party has become known for. It turns out that Ted's father, Rafael Cruz, is a pastor with Texas charismatic ministry Purifying Fire International who has been campaigning against Obamacare the last several months. He has a distinct theological vision for what America is supposed to look like: Christian dominionism.

This dominionist trend has been lurking in the shadows of American evangelicalism for decades -- sometimes more pronounced, sometimes less, but always present. You didn't have to scratch Sarah Palin very hard to watch it come out, and the same seems to be the case with Cruz.

And you can see the kind of faith in the idea that the Church will replace and supplant the government (in every regard, in Rushdoony's ultimate vision), in the confidant avowals by Tea Partiers and their water carriers in Congress that, once the government is shut down, people will quickly realize how little they need it, and how easily the "private sector" can step in to do everything that we've gotten so used to government doing. And, if you belong to this particular branch of evangelical subculture, you can deceive yourself into believing this quite readily:

So to pull all this logic together, God anoints priests to work in the church directly and kings to go out into the marketplace to conquer, plunder, and bring back the spoils to the church. The reason governmental regulation has to disappear from the marketplace is to make it completely available to the plunder of Christian "kings" who will accomplish the "end time transfer of wealth." Then "God's bankers" will usher in the "coming of the messiah." The government is being shut down so that God's bankers can bring Jesus back.

And here's the thing. When you get a lot of people together in a megachurch, you can do some pretty impressive things with your mission projects. You can feed thousands of people and host ESL classes and job training programs and medical clinics. And I imagine that seeing your accomplishments could give you the hubris of thinking we don't need a government at all to make our society run; our church can be the new government.

More's the pity for us if this brand of evangelicalism continues to take hold. It's a remarkable confluence of economic libertarianism, political anarchism, and religious authoritarianism that should leave us gasping in fear. If you want to know what the early marks of religious totalitarianism look like, these are your indicators.

May 30, 2013

Redstate.com's Eric Erickson went on Fox Business the other day and made some rather ... amusing ... comments about the scientific evidence that men are supposed to be the "breadwinners" in the family because ... birds, I suppose.

In response, Ed Kilgore made a very astute observation about the nature of the world that conservatives think we should all go "back" to, a world where the men do the working and the women raise the kids (which is, not work?). Ed wonders what the policy implications should be of desiring such a world:

If you are a conservative misogynist who doesn’t believe in using government to achieve desired social means any more than is necessary, it gets tough .... After all, many women are in the work force instead of staying home to be “full-time moms” not because they are lacking the beneficent servant-leadership of a man, but because the menfolk can’t earn enough to support a family alone. An economy characterized by high and growing inequality isn’t terribly conducive to large families and stay-at-home mothers outside the very privileged classes. And anyone saying “it used to work” might want to consider the kind of collective bargaining agreements, minimum wage laws, and subsidized housing arrangements we “used to have”—back before we all understood that those items were socialistic and hence un-American.

And this is really the crux of it. Conservatives have a mythic view of society, one that doesn't conform to any actual society that's actually existed, but which is best understood by imagining that all conservative policy is based on watching repeated Leave It To Beaver marathons.